


Fault Lines

by NoFootprintsInSand



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Forced Marriage, Marking, Possessive Behavior, Rough Sex, Stockholm Syndrome, Unhealthy Co-dependency, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-23 12:58:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18550240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoFootprintsInSand/pseuds/NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: She can feel his hands more than she can feel the Wrath writ on her skin. She can feel the breath of his laugh on her neck more than she can feel her sins.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I was done with these screwed-up people, but alas. I wanted to bury myself in all things Hannibal, instead I find myself working through the forced marriage kink I never knew I had. I’m the worst. As before: trigger warnings. Check those tags.
> 
> My unending gratitude to Unquiet_Grave, who incredibly graciously agreed to look over this story for me. She improved on my grammar, and she came with helpful suggestions and thoughts that improved on the story as a whole. It’s the first time ever I’ve had someone beta my writing, and I can’t tell you the difference it makes. She’s an incredibly talented lady, go check out her stuff if you haven’t already. Her The Outsider series properly BROKE my black little heart, and I am so in love with Midnight Swim and Autre Temps

“You will confess. Every sin you’ve ever committed, no matter how petty, no matter how small…I will pull from you. Then we’ll see if you’re worthy of Atonement.”

And he drags her straight from river to bunker, to do just that.

“Now? We’re doing this now?”

“No time like the present, Deputy!”

Fuck her life.

****

She is soaking wet and shivering, stinks of the Henbane, remnants of Bliss cling to her hair and her brain.  She aches all over, and she wishes he would stop with all the  _whistling_. It grates on her brain, right along with the red light permeating the room through that wretched antler chandelier. 

Not to mention the strips of tattooed human skin he’s got stapled to the back of his workbench.

She’s got to hand it to John Seed: he knows how to create an effective atmosphere for torture. Ever the performer, yes, such a charismatic psychopath!

She pants out a broken laugh.

He saunters over, knife idly dangling from his hand, and leans down over her where she sits trussed. 

“I don’t like you.”

“Sticks and stones, asshole.”

He continues as if she didn’t speak. 

“I don’t see in you what Joseph sees. But it’s not for me to question the Father. He has seen a purpose in you. He wants you to reach Atonement, and I will help you achieve it.”

He claps his hands together and her heart speeds up. The look on his face is bloodthirsty and mordant. Mirth and violence brim over in his light gaze, seeping outwards, towards her. It touches her skin, it touches her eyes.

It writhes and tangles around her heart.

He enjoys causing pain a little too fervently, and he will tear her to pieces. He will. She freely admits to herself that she is choking on her own fear.

“Now then, Deputy…I promised your soul a good scrubbing, didn’t I?”

“Fuck you.”

“....along with your mouth, it seems,” he tsks at her as he pulls her upright by her bound arms. “Ready for your confession, my dear?”

She struggles against him, more to make a point than out of any real belief that she’ll get free. 

“Look at you,” he tuts. “Oh, you’ve wreaked quite the havoc, haven’t you? But tell me, Deputy, without your guns and your bombs and your bulletproof vests and your friends...when it’s just little old  _you_...” he makes a point of tugging her close to him, so she will know that her nose just barely reaches his chest, “about 100 pounds soaking wet...” and he effortlessly lifts her up, dripping water all the while, and slams her down on the workbench “how much do you really think you have to set against me  _now_? Hmm?” 

“Why don’t you even out the playing field a little, and we’ll see?” she says, indicating her bound hands.

He snorts. “I think not.”

“Chickenshit.”

“Time to temper that moooouuuth,” he sing-songs, and backhands her. It’s lips breaking against teeth, it’s ringing ears, and sure, she’s had worse, and she is certain this is just a breeze of tender foreplay while he builds up to the actual  _maiming_ , but still. It stings. She licks at the copper tang and glares at him, then lashes out quickly, before he has any real time to react; slams her head into his face and snarls in satisfaction at the blood that starts trickling from his nose. 

Blood for blood. Tit for tat.

She might be going down, but not quietly. 

Never mind that she just gave herself a blinding headache on top of everything else. Never mind that she is fucked.

The effect of her rebellion is instantaneous. He growls, and the blue in his eyes goes black. He slams her so hard against the back of the workbench that her vision goes double, and rams his arm up against her throat, cutting off all her air. He stands between her legs, and snarls straight into her face.

“Ah, you’re quite the little hellion, aren’t you? This will be so much  _fun.”_

“John. No.” 

The voice interrupting their scuffle comes from above and is soft, gentle, but admonishment curls sharp within it. 

Joseph. She turns her head as much as she is able in John’s grip, and looks at him slowly descending the stairs.

“You are both children of Wrath, and together you must turn away from you Sin. Remember, John, how I told you to open up your heart, see that there is love around. You must show the Deputy love, my brother, so that she may love you in return. You must teach her, and then you shall walk together through the Gates of Eden.”

He reaches her and John’s side, and smiles blindingly at them. This is the second time Joseph has saved her from John’s ministrations, but her guts roil in terror. This isn’t really a rescue. Danger. So much  _danger._  From the man holding her pressed against the workbench, sure, but more so from the prophet now studying her with a penetrating, yellow-tinged gaze. The…  _wrongness_  emanates from him in waves, and she stills entirely under John’s hands, weary of making any sort of movement that might prompt Joseph to tear her soul clean from her bones. 

He puts his hands on both of their shoulders, and she finds herself leaning into  _John_  to get away from his touch.

“I see it now; you are tied to each other.” He looks at John, presses his forehead against his. “This woman is to be your wife.”

 So paralysed is she that it takes her several moments to register what he just said.

“Wife?!” she wheezes out.

Joseph nods solemnly, still with that smile. 

“Yes, my child. I’ve seen it. If you don’t walk through the Gates as one, you shall not walk through at all.” 

The last part is clearly aimed at John, who leans down towards her ear. Perhaps to Joseph the gesture is gentle, touching on loving, but she can feel him digging his nails harshly into the skin of her throat, out of Joseph’s view.

“Surprise!” John drawls, tight against her cheek. This close she can see the dark flare in his eyes, the tightening of his brows, the grinding of his teeth. He is just as surprised, and just as unhappy.

Oh, he hates her right back.

Joseph speaks again, that vibrant prophet’s voice carelessly thrown over his shoulder as he moves to leave.

“Take her up to the compound, John. You are to be wed tonight.”

“This won’t happen,” she hisses at him, furious and scared, as he hauls her off the workbench and drags her along with him. His jaw bunches, and his grip will leave wreaths of bruises on her skin.

“If the Father ordains it, then it will.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me, Seed! You don’t want this either, why the  _fuck_ are you…”

He glances to the side to make sure that Joseph is out of view then slams her against concrete. Mortar snows down over them, settles in their eyelashes and hair.

“You’re quite right. I don’t. But I would never go against Joseph’s word. And I guess I have to scrape together silver linings. What do you think your precious Resistance will feel, seeing you meek and obedient at my side? Their deadly little figurehead, docile wife to  _me?_ Quite a blow to morale, don’t you think?”

No doubt Joseph’s intention, right ahead of the supposed salvation of his brother’s pitch-black soul.

“They will never believe I willingly agreed to this. And  _docile_?  _Meek_? Did you fall face first into a barrel of Bliss?”

“Docile and tame in my  _bed,”_  he adds with a hiss.

“That won’t happen. That won’t  _ever_  happen!” She is confident of that too. She’s escaped before, she will escape again. More so now.  _Especially_  now.

He smiles, and gently combs her sweaty hair out of her face so that he may put his lips close to her ear. 

“Tell you the truth, Deputy, I kinda hope it won’t happen too,” he whispers. “At least not straight away. I will enjoy bringing you to heel. But docile or not, in my bed you shall be, even if I have to chain you to it. If I have to be stuck with you, you little wretch, then by God I’m at least going to enjoy watching you  _squirm_.” 

He snarls out the last word, and bites her earlobe, draws blood. 

“Whoops!” he croons. “Love bite.” 

****

In the end it takes Jacob Seed and four burly guards to hold her still enough for John to slide the ring on her finger.

_(“If you so much as **think**  about taking it off, I’ll glue it right back on.”)_

“Congratulations, brother,” Jacob sourly tells him and thumps a hand on his shoulder. John’s face is painted in wrath. Joseph smiles beatifically and shrewdly at them all.

She, she is trying not to cry.

****

He drives them down to his ranch late that night, two armed Peggies in the backseat, should she try anything in the car.

He flamboyantly waves his arms around. “Behold your new pris... _home_ , dearest wife! I suppose it  _could_  do with a female touch.”

She glances around at all the dark wood and leather and animal pelts. 

“No shit,” she mutters, under her breath. But her attention is drawn to windows, doors. Escape routes. He finds and exposes her surreptitious, flitting gaze, and laughs. 

“There are armed guards in pairs all along the perimeter, at every exit and inside this house, Deputy. Escaping is fruitless, so don’t even try.”

She snorts quietly. 

Last is the bedroom. Large, with only one bed. She turns against his grip on her arm. “So where do I sleep?”

He jerks his chin towards the bed. 

“No. No fucking way.” 

She starts struggling in earnest now, desperate pants as he drags her across the floor by the scruff of her neck as easily as if she were a wayward, naughty kitten. 

“John, stop, I…”

He snarls, and shakes her in his grip. “Told you I would. You really think I would let you out of my sight at night, Deputy?”

Indifferent, as if her struggles are a mere trifle, he cuffs her right hand to the bedpost, and smiles cheerfully at the fear and fury on her face. He shrugs off his vest and shirt, kicks off his boots, then gets into bed with his back to her.

“Go to sleep,” he mutters over his shoulder. 

She doesn’t. She can’t. She stays tethered next to him, relieved and distressed, wide awake, staring blindly into the darkness, listening as he is wrecked with nightmares and terror all night.

****

He gives her new clothes. Thin dresses in colours that would light up the night: beautiful chains of satin and silk. 

Last, he pulls something out of a red velvet box with a flourish.

“Jacob uses these when he hunts and tracks wolves for his Judges. I thought it would go  _perfectly_ with your eyes.”

He clasps a heavy tracking collar around her neck, and she swears it’s the weight of her entire soul. He locks it together with a small padlock, adds another key to the thong of leather around his neck. 

She looks at herself in the mirror that night. The collar is too big and crude - made for a fully grown wolf - and mars the tender column of her throat. The golden band around her finger burns heavy in wretched alchemy.

She supposes it’s perfect just like that.

****

He takes her back up to Joseph’s compound, Hudson in easy eyeshot with a knife against her throat all the while. Dressed in a cream dress and a wolf collar and eyes spitting with rage she stands stiff in his jovial embrace, as he doles out propaganda and morality blows. 

_(“You would never believe this, but she said....” he raises his hands up to the lit up YES sign above, “YES!”)_

He broadcasts it out to all of Hope County, and she swears she will kill him one day.

****

A few days in, and he comes across her in the kitchen, shuffling around the cupboards, trying to cook herself some food.

“Oh no, darling.” He raises an eyebrow in delight at her clenched teeth. “We have help for that. Wouldn’t do for my beloved wife to do  _housework_.”

“But what will I  _do?_ ” She resists the urge to stomp her feet, hates herself for how low he has brought her. “I can’t just do nothing. I can’t. I  _can’t_!”

She has always been active, busy; a flitting, restless mind with flitting, restless hands. A creature of action and flight. Being trapped doing nothing is almost as bad as being married to him. It spins her mind at a tilt, leaves it askew. It’s making it ever harder to breathe, this pressing tedium, this isolation, this echoing  _nothing_. 

But oh, his eyes burn with a blue flame of delight at this exposed weakness, and she realises too late that she has thrown gift-wrapped ammunition by his feet.

“Admittedly I’m not very, ah… _au fait_  with all this domestic lark, but, hmm...needlework? Oh! Or would you like me to find you a piano tutor? Or perhaps the harpsichord?” he asks faux earnestly. 

“Go to hell.” 

He laughs at her retreating back.

****

It doesn’t take her long to settle on a pastime suitable enough to keep her sane: goading and antagonising him. 

It’s backtalk and small slights against his authority and rearranging his taxidermy into lewd, unbiblical positions. It’s humming the same song over and over again, dress as inappropriately as she is able within her confines and mocks the Book of Joseph at every turn. 

She revels in his polite smile and raging eyes, his clenched jaw and white knuckles. It makes the sleepless nights chained next to his mare-ridden body just that little bit easier to take.

Playing with fire keeps her occupied. 

He puts an end to it fast enough.

He finds her out back in the stables where she isn’t allowed to go, helping the Peggy assigned to stable duties mucking out for the ostentatious thoroughbreds. She’s wearing a fancy long evening gown, and she is filthy.

“Oh dearest _,”_ he hisses through a smile, “I’m afraid this  _really_  won’t do.” 

“Oh but darling, I thought you liked to see me in silk,” she mocks. 

“Ah, yes, you are quite right, sweet wife of mine. But!” He touches his chin in mock contemplation, and she catches the deadly glint in his eye far too late. 

“It needs something. Jewels? Hmmm, no, that’s not  _ittttttt_...” 

He snaps his fingers even as she starts to back away, terror raised high in her throat. 

“I know!” 

And he casually shoots the man standing next to her, right in the head. 

Covers spring green silk in bright reds and brains. 

“That’s better! Pollock-esque. Now then...” He harshly grabs her arm, digs in so hard it will leave bruises, and twists her around, starts walking up to the house. “What I really came down here to talk to you about.” she tries to disguise her sobs as growls, fails miserably, and she can feel him rumble in delight as he drags her by his side “-is that I need to go away for a little while.” 

He pulls her up the porch, into the house and up the stairs. 

“To Atlanta. Lawyerly business, nothing you need concern your pretty head with.” He chucks her under her chin, makes sure to leave a scratch. They’ve come to a stop outside a reinforced door, and he opens it, gestures grandly with his free arm. It’s a tiny bare room, no windows, one bucket. 

“Now, it’s not that I don't trust you, but... well, I don’t trust you.” He kisses her forehead, then harshly pushes her into the room. She lands awkwardly on her left arm, hits her head on the far wall.

“Don’t wait up, honey!”

And he slams the door shut. 

She lies on the cold floor, covered in silk and blood, and listens to gunshots outside, no doubt aimed at the rest of her assigned guards. 

He does so have a temper, her husband.

 _Guess stable girl is off the list of ways to occupy myself,_  she thinks, then she laughs until she starts screaming, and then she screams until her voice breaks in two. 

****

She is near insanity when he finally returns, has in all likelihood already crossed. She’s started to see  _things_  in the nothingness, things that aren’t there. 

“Joseph said you had to love me!” is all she can croak out as she crawls in the light from the doorway, squints against it, and she can’t believe how needy _,_ howforlorn and  _broken_ she sounds. Like a child begging an emotionally cold parent for affection. Like a dog trying to lick an abusive master’s hand.

And all it took was unquantifiable time in total blackness, without water and food.

“I fear that Joseph, otherwise wise beyond compare, didn’t  _quite_  realise your need for a firm hand.”

She chokes on desperation, on the ashes left of her will. The ring is so hot around her finger that she wonders why she can’t smell burning flesh.

“Will you be good now? Will you  _behave_?”

She can’t bring herself to give in completely; she can’t bring herself to say the word he wants to hear the most.

But she nods, and he takes it. 

For now.

****

They play house for a while. She drifts around the ranch during the day, talks to the stuffed animals, lose little pieces of herself in each room. She loses memories and faces and facts, and sometimes she mutely dances in place, barefoot on the wooden floor.

Sways in time to gunshots and sermons only she can hear. 

She searches for sensations, to feel something other than air. She runs her naked feet slowly along the animal pelts, drags her hands harshly across the wooden walls. 

Smiles at the splinters in her skin while her eyes burn with sleepless nights. 

In the evenings he will come home for dinner, elbows dripping with blood, eyes flashing, mouth full to the brim with people’s sins. 

She hates it all.

Even so, it seems that he too has something of Joseph’s magnetism, that dark, insidious power. As time wears, she finds that she is having to force herself to oppose him, having to suppress the primal, stupid,  _weak_  urge to bare her throat to him in supplication.

She knows what he’s doing to her, but she is helpless to stop the fall.

She is still sleep shackled to his nightmares at night.

****

“I want you to do it to me.”

He spins around where he sits in his office. “Do what?”

She walks over to stand between his knees, and enjoys how his light eyes go dark.

“The confession. The tattoo.”

He smiles. Oh how he  _smiles._  

****

When he finally finishes she walks slowly over to the mirror, pulls the dress down so she can properly see the letters raised on her skin. He comes to stand close behind her, hands holding her shoulders too hard, his chin on top of her head, front pressed against her back. He is warm.

“I could hardly feel it,” she says flatly. “I thought it would hurt more.” 

But it did not, and she’s disappointed. She can feel John’s hands, brands on her shoulders, more than she can feel the  _Wrath_  writ on her skin. She can feel the breath of his laugh on her neck more than she can feel her sins.

“Oh, I know what’s going on here,” he whispers into her hair, slides his hands tenderly along the collar about her neck.

“Of course you do. You did this,” she says to their mirror images.

This is the most he’s ever touched her, and she can feel him inside too, feel him slide along all the black ice in her mind.

She finds that she wants to be inside him in return. Wants to nestle inside the widening fault line cracked into him when young.

“Do you genuinely believe in all this? Do you believe in God, do you believe the world will end? Or is it just an excuse to cut into people, hurt them, indulge your...sins?”

He doesn’t let go of her eyes in the mirror, and she doesn’t let go of his. He slowly strokes down her collarbones, and she hates it but is terrified that he’ll stop.

“I believe in Joseph.”

She snorts, and bares her teeth. “That fucking  _nut_.”

He stills, goes so utterly still, and somehow that is worse than his usual restless bloodthirst. 

“Did you ever stop to think, Deputy, about why no one has come to find you? Did you ever think that something is going on, out on the other side, so serious, so severe, that people of the law can go missing, and no one have time to wonder? You’ve been here with me for  _months._ And yet no one is looking for you. No one  _will_.”

She goes cold. He flicks out his tongue, tastes her fear on the air.

“The end is coming, Deputy. Never doubt that.  _I_  don’t. It’s  _coming._  And it’s coming soon. _”_

To her terror she finds that while she might not believe Joseph, she does believe John Seed. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The following day security finally lapses (oh, she’s  _behaved_  and waited for  _so long_ ). It’s but for a few seconds, but it’s enough, and she seizes it between her teeth and  _runs_. 

She runs in a light summer dress dotted with purple nightshade and fear, soft slippers falling apart on her feet. She runs with copper on her tongue and terror in her hair and the collar weighing on her neck.

She runs knowing that, really, she doesn’t stand a single fucking chance.

She runs anyway. Runs, because now the feeling of his hands is better than feeling nothing at all.

She flits between trees and boulders, whispering  _please please please._ Pivots between moonlight and shadow, spins out of reality and into delusion then back again, tries to suffocate giggles and sobs.

He comes after her with every man available to him. Searchlights and dogs and a radio transmitter. They don’t hurry, because there’s no need.

Of course there isn’t.

She goes to ground in a thicket, works furiously on the collar around her neck. It won’t come off, and she hasn’t the tools to make it.

She can hear only her own heartbeats and the whine low in her throat, until his voice rings out into the night.

“Deputy! I’ve sent my men back home. It’s just you and me now, wife of mine. And I assure you, my prey instincts are  _very_  well developed.”

She can hear him pace, boots crunching on leaves. Hears the restless fury in his movements, the restrained violence.

“Come out, you little idiot. Come here now, and I’ll go easy on you.”

She runs instead, breaks cover and runs. A foolish thing to do, when did she become so foolish? Hears his footfalls behind her, and he isn’t even making a real effort, the cocky bastard. Even so, he’s getting closer, and closer, and suddenly he launches himself at her back. They tumble down together, her scratching at his face before they even hit the grass.

He’s a furious beast now, any polished veneer of his fallen entirely away. His true, fractured self taking over. 

“Got you,” he growls. 

She struggles underneath him as he straddles her and pins her down, thighs on either side of her hips, her arms wrenched and held behind her head. She snarls and spits and bucks and trashes, and he holds her still so fucking easily, leans down and puts his lips close to her ear. 

“I think it’s about time you were brought to  _heel_ , little Wrath.”

She looks up at him, his pupils blown wide, flushes of red on his cheeks. He’s a predator at heart, and her flight and struggles have excited him, brought the most primal part of him to the fore. And she, she is once again gripped by the queer need to submit. Stop with the struggling. Take from him what he is taking from her.

Oh, what has she become?

He moves from her ear down her throat, mouths at her collarbone. Takes her wrists in one hand and pulls her dress down with the other so he can reach Wrath, and bites at each letter in turn. They are still fresh, and tender, and she didn’t know possession could feel so good, so weightless, so  _free_. 

So wretched.

_“….innocence is a wonderful thing except for the fact that it’s impotent. Guilt is power. Only the damned can be saved.”_

Words read in a long ago forgotten book suddenly crawls from the recesses of her subconscious to the front of her memory. It’s a knife-sharp, peculiar moment shrouded in night. Removed from her body, standing aside, she studies the words, holds them up like gleaming jewels in her hand. Then she slams back inside.

She makes sure to catch his eyes. And she leans her head back as far as she can in the grass, offers up the soft, fragile skin of her throat.

Supplicates.

He smiles.

He bunches her dress up around her waist and lets his hand journey along the landscape of her, discovers curves and untraveled roads, indents and nerves and softness and angles. Draws a nipple in his mouth, uses more teeth than tongue, and chuckles when her hips jerk upwards, when she gasps. He moves her thigh up around his waist, and slides himself along her wetness and warmth. 

“I’m your husband,” he mutters against her heart, and he presses inside her as he kisses her for the very first time. “And you are my wife.” 

He licks the words into her mouth, and moves his hips so savagely that she feels sure they’ll both sink down into the earth, and she can’t stand it, it’s too overwhelming, too big, too far beyond her grasp.

“John! John,  _please_! I’ve not...I’m not...”

Something in her voice gets through to him; perhaps the titillating fact that she  _begs_ , and he slows down, just a little.

“It feels too much,” she says hoarsely. “I’m not used to feeling this much. I can’t bear it.”

“I don’t care,” he says, and she swears the moonlight can’t touch him, it splinters and bounces and warps off his skin, gets eaten whole by the blackness in his eyes. “You will bear this and more. You will take it all.” 

He flips her over, has her on her hands and knees in the dew, holds her still for him by the wolf collar as he snaps back inside her again. He thrusts so hard she can feel little pieces of her soul fall away into the grass. Goes so deep, deeper than anyone ever gone before. Tattoos her on the inside, too. 

“You will never, ever run from me again.” He chants in time with his thrusts, a holy prayer, a blood oath pulled from her body into his: “ _You. Are. Mine.”_

 _“_ Yes!”she pants and she  _means_  it, even though it’s a lie.

John tattooing sins into her skin had felt like a whisper, but this, this burns her alive.

****

Back home in the bedroom he takes her again, insatiable now, hungry and sharp with victory, heedless of mud and grass stains and needles in her hair. She screams into his mouth as she finishes, and he swallows it whole.

“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

“Fuck yourself, Seed.”

He huffs a laugh against the back of her neck, then pulls her close. “I’m pretty sure it was the other way round.” He bites into her shoulder, leaves a mark for all to see. 

“Why did you do that? As if people don't already know thanks to this fucking collar.”

His voice loses all mirth. “Oh darling, the collar... the collar is ownership, sure, keeping you in place, but  _this”_ he bites her again, draws blood, makes marks, causes her shudder and groan “this means you are truly  _mine_.”

He won’t ever let her forget who made her feel like this. 

****

One night she finally rouses him from his night terrors, runs her hand along his blazing brow until he screams awake.

“I want to eat your nightmares,” she says. “I can’t ever sleep because of them. They drive me  _crazy_. I want to tear them to pieces and swallow them down.”

He rolls atop her, thrusts inside her so fiercely she screams.

“Take them like this instead,” he says into her mouth, “take them from me, take them inside of you and keep them there.”

He bites at her, leaves teeth and fingerprints, leaves dark matter and starlight painted on her skin. Pushes against her cervix like he’s trying to get into her womb, leave all his terror in there. Uses her body as a crucifix and her sweat as holy water, and she throws her head back and allows him to exorcise himself into her. 

Afterwards he sleeps soundly while she weeps quietly. Because even if she wanted to, she can’t take his horrors clean from him. She can only hold them for a little while. 

And she’s not even sure he deserves that much.

She cries over the child he once was. She cries for the monster he is. She cries for herself, irrevocably embraced in his chains.

“You’re in my blood, you fuck,” she whispers into his hair.

He doesn’t stir. 

****

Time moves in weird kinks and knots around her, confusing her, sending her into tailspins.

But she sees autumn from the windows, then she sees frost and snow.

She remembers what seasons are, she hasn’t forgotten, and she knows they are headed for spring.

*****

She is wrapped around him as he sleeps, spends the night sliding her mind along the constellations out there, far up in the sky. But as they fade with dawn her thoughts become too much to bear, and she needs him roused.

“Won’t you cut it out?”

“What?”

His movements are slow and his eyes soft with sleep as he pulls her closer, slides his lips along the thin skin on her jugular. Hums along to the song of her blood.

“My sin.” She takes his hand and puts it on her chest. “Won’t you cut it from my skin?”

He chuckles hoarsely, moves drowsily as close to her as he can come, then closer still.

“I don’t want to cut away your skin, Deputy. I want to dive underneath it instead, take midnight swims in your veins, tangle my words in your hair, merge my marrow with yours. So that you can never get away from me, even if you don’t atone.”

She slides her hand down, to her favourite place in the dark world of him, that tender, sweet spot where hip meets groin. She strokes the vulnerable softness there with her fingertips, and she tries to cry silently, so he won’t know.

She wants to travel down there with her lips too, but he captures them with his instead, kisses her quietly and slow, rolls her sobs on his tongue.

In the hinterlands between waking and sleep he is almost vulnerable, almost true, and she wishes they could live here forever.

****

She is allowed the illusion of freedom now, and she will drift around out on the grounds, let the wind move her hair and the spring sun stroke freckles across her nose.

Her eyes float along the mountains, and she daydreams sleek swallow’s wings onto her back.

But she isn’t sure she could fly. 

She supposes that’s hardly strange. He’s worked so hard at fracturing her. Twisting and then bending her right, so that she’d heal  _wrong_. Now her cracks are crossed with his and they are fused, a violent entity, a warped chimera unable to survive without all its parts. They live under each other’s skin; drink blood beaten by the other’s heart. 

They look out of each other’s eyes. 

Yes, she can feel his eyes now, and she turns and sees him walking down towards her from the house. Perhaps he felt her mind drift, shared her bird's eye view soaring over the mountains, and has come to ensure she won’t set flight. He grabs her by the wolf collar, pulls her close for a kiss that draws blood.

She takes sick pleasure in the slight frown of worry on his face, the uneven flecks of vulnerability in his eyes, and she wants to lick the softness from his upper lip and make it snarl. It’s safer that way. 

“From a distance you looked transparent, like you would disintegrate with a breeze,” he says and presses his forehead to hers. She wants to recoil from the intimacy, but she wants to lean into it more.

She sighs and feels his unease through her skin, strokes her fingers across the veins and tattoos on his wrist, strums along to the susurrus of his blood. His gaze is trained on the mountains, is worrying at the horizon, like he wants to tear it apart and see what’s behind.

“Is it far off? Joseph’s Collapse?”

“No,” he says. Then: “You still don’t believe, do you?” His voice is low, even though the acolytes, her guards, keep a respectful distance from them and can’t hear.

“No. I....I don’t know. I believe that  _you_  believe.”

“You should believe  _Joseph_ , darling wife. For both our sakes.”

“Well pardon me, he’s a fucking crazy doomsday prophet! They’re not meant to be  _right.”_

The punishment is immediate, as he twirls her around and slams her into his chest, face first. Holds her pressed to him with a hand behind her head, another wrapped around her and squeezing far too hard. She can feel her ribs strain as he suffocates her with his heartbeats, can feel her head going empty and light. He finds her ear with his mouth, and she stills her struggles at his voice, the scratch of his beard against her cheek.

“Start believing, dearest, or we’ll both be shut out.”

He releases her enough that she can look up at him, draw breaths, and he chuckles at what he sees.

“I adore your defiance.” He slides his hand down the front of her dress and drags his fingers along the raised letters there “-and I love your wrath.  But in this we’ll need to temper both, and we’re running out of time.”

She doesn’t answer, and turns her back to him, doesn’t want him to see what’s in her eyes, doesn’t want him to sense the words scratching at her throat. He slips his arms around her from behind, she sinks back into him, and they watch the sun set and the moon touch the mountain peaks. 

“Do you know how it will happen?” she asks, and hums in pain when he digs his nails into her arms. It steadies her.

“No,” he says at last.

She is pretty sure he lies.

****

“Who now?” she asks him. She flits like a spectre between windows all day, watches how he moves between baptisms and bunker and atonements and back again to the ranch. He’s busy, and she struggles to draw breaths as activity steps ever up.

It’s impossible for her, to bear him coming home wearing the blood of her friends. 

“I’m saving them, darling. The Collapse is ever-nearing, I’ve  _told_  you, and I’m cleansing them of sin.” He smiles at her, the deranged way he only smiles when he’s been wallowing in someone’s pain, and she wants to tear it from his blood-spattered face.

“And you? You think  _you’re_  saved? What  _bullshit_. Why do you think Joseph saddled you with me? Because he sees through you, he knows that you’re a  _fraud_. Knows that you’re a faithless sinner and that I’m one too. He gave me to you to ensure you won’t get to taint his precious fucking Eden and...”

He pushes her backwards onto the bed and digs his fingers into her throat, cuts off her words and her air, so she smiles at him instead. A last rebellion, pathetic and sincere.

“ _Enough_ ”, he whispers into her gasping mouth, wipes blood from his lips onto hers.

 _Fuck you,_  she mouths, as he squeezes so hard her vision goes black. Then he lets up, and kisses her deeply even as she’s gasping for breath. She can taste the blood on her tongue, can sees bloodied fingerprints on her light dress. 

“Did you know, Deputy, that you’re exquisitely beautiful when you’re scared?”

He pulls her close in what feels like a believable facsimile of love, and she strokes his back under the shirt, unable to tell scars from tattoos. He slides into her like he’s got the right, like he lives there.

“I wanted you from the first time I saw you frightened, and now you’re here, underneath me where you belong. You’re mine.” He thrusts harder, and she whines low in her throat, digs her nails in, holds him close to her, tries to imprint him on top of the letters on her chest. “And sometimes you make me wish my heart was big enough to hold you. But it is far too small.”

He looks down on her, and she’s terrified of the tender look on his face. “Your eyes are the colour of envy,” he mutters “and your soul is thunder, rent by lightning.” 

She laughs, and it’s breathless and bitter. “And your soul is the colour of night. All blackness shot through with light from stars that are already dead.” She speaks into the blue of his eyes as he comes, and she comes, and the electricity of him tears her in two. 

“You are eating away at me,” she says afterwards, lies on the bed with someone else’s blood on her skin. “You are chipping away at who I am, carving into me. Making me into something  _else_. I  _hate_  you.”

His eyes burn with delight. She’s given him so much power over her, yes, such a gift!

He’s forced a part of her heart to beat for him.

“Tell me something, darling wife. If you could, would you leave? If I said to you: y _ou are free_ …would you run?”

She stares at him in mute anguish, her certain answer frozen on her tongue. He chuckles low in his throat.

“Thought so.”

*****

So of course she runs.

Just to  _show_  him.

He sleeps so deeply, now when she’s holding on to his horrors on his behalf. So she slips the key from his neck, loosens the collar, and disappears into the night. 

She runs for the Whitetails, straight into clear, thin air. Determined to leave Hope County forever, even though she drops shards of herself on the ground as she goes.

She ignores the hollowness, how he’s gouged out a space deep inside her and forcibly inserted himself there, fused his bones with hers. And now the further she gets from him, the more it hurts.

That insidious bastard, he’d entirely slithered under her skin, just like he said he would. She should have known. She should’ve realised that someone as broken as him would fracture her equally as bad. Make some of the broken pieces yearn for him. 

She can’t. She  _can’t_. 

She stops her running, paces on the spot. Walks in circles, screams mutely, worries at her nails. Stands on the mountainside as the sun goes up and dawn breaks.

Takes a few steps back the way she came.

Back towards  _him._

And then, then the bombs fall.

****

The sky is on fire above her head. The world is ending, all is becoming ash, and all she can do is stand there and watch it all fall down. She stands frozen, crippled by the knowledge that Joseph was right. He was right all along. That creepy fucking bastard  _was right_.

She can’t stop looking at the mushroom clouds, the strange, beautiful symmetry of death.

Someone slams into her with full force. 

John.

She has no idea how, but he’d come after her, come for her, somehow  _found_  her, even though it’s all about to end.

Oh, perhaps she’s ripped off pieces from him too, stolen them, taken them deep inside.

They’d begun living in each other’s fault lines, hadn’t they? Cracks that had become trenches, trenches with them inside. Shooting at each other from inside enemy lines. 

Such a  _waste_.

“Why the fuck did you come after me?” she screams, and the approaching fire makes her tears burn hot on her cheeks. “Look at this! Look! It’s all  _ending_. Why didn’t you stay? You’d be....”

_Safe._

“I told you to never run from me again!” He shakes her, and she has seen him furious, but never like this. His wrath burns hotter than the approaching doom, singes her skin where he’s grabbing her arms.

It doesn’t  _matter_  anyway. There is nowhere to run  _to_  anymore.

He knows as well, and goes quiet and still close to her. He still holds her arms in an iron grip, makes sure she can’t ever leave his side, even if  _ever_  is but a few short second away.

Oh, finity is breathing down their necks. 

Behind them rolls aching beauty, mountain tops kissed by snow, meadows of wild blooms. Blue sky and freedom, ice cold and sharp.

Ahead of them thunders the end of days, yellow-hazed, violent and ugly. 

But it’s quiet here, they’re in a bubble, standing together and alone between two seconds.

He huffs out a strangled laugh, looks down the mountainside towards the end. “I’ll give you that, Deputy. You got us front row seats.”

She faces him entirely, turns in his arms and puts her back against the destruction; it’s enough to see the end of the world reflected in his eyes. 

“Did you know?” she asks. “Did you know it would happen now?”

He hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “Yes.”

She thinks this might be the first time he’s ever been completely honest with her, and she feels she must give him something back, even though she’s got barely anything to give.

“I don’t hate you,” she says. 

He raises an eyebrow, smiles, and it’s almost beautiful. 

“Me neither,” he says.

And then the wall of fire is on them, burning away all their sins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The “….innocence is a wonderful thing except for the fact that it’s impotent” etc quote comes from the wonderful Stephen Donaldson, more specifically his book ‘The Wounded Land”.
> 
> Thanks again must go to Unquiet_Grave, for reading and improving on this piece muchly. That lady is undoubtedly an angel (with horns. And maybe a pitchfork. She’s fucking AWESOME, is what I’m trying to say). I’ve dicked around with this more since she last had a read-through, so any mistakes and oddities you spot are entirely my fault. Also you must read her Far Cry stories. They are sharply funny and wildly sad and beautifully written and perfect.
> 
> And, I think I’ve got another John/Deputy in me. I had to cull a bunch of scenes from this one for being too cheerful (lols) and immediately thought of another storyline where I could recycle them. Hey ho. I’ll come for you soon, my poor neglected Hannibal fic. I will.


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